Free Republic

This is intelligence and most of it comes from our Government Communications Headquarters, or GCHQ. Based in a huge doughnut-shaped complex outside Cheltenham, GCHQ, among other things, is the great watcher and listener of our espionage array. High in Inner Space, out of reach of telescopes and missiles, cameras and recorders roll through the ether at exactly the same speed as earth, thus remaining stationary over any spot they are wanted. Gazing down, they record everything beneath them and it is beamed straight back to GCHQ. Thus we know what the Russian elite is doing and saying. And it is...

The Prime Minister of Israel said that the country stands on the side of Ukraine. Israel has created a field hospital to care for the wounded and is doing everything possible to help stop Russia's war against Ukraine. Israel has created a humanitarian air bridge to Ukraine. It is planned to deliver 6 air shipments within the next few weeks. According to him, over the next few weeks, six cargo planes will bring medicines, medicines, food and the like. The first batch has already been delivered to Ukraine, - he wrote. Recently, Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett said that the...

The head of the Luhansk regional military administration Serhii Haidai told what course of events he expects during the battle for Donbas He told about it in an interview with Ukrainian Pravda, reported by Censor.NET. "We understand that there will be an offensive in the near future. There will be a huge battle for Donbas. We see that there is an accumulation of forces and resources. A huge amount of equipment. Well, we are preparing," he said. Gaidai noted that the invaders need "at least some victory." Therefore, they will try to reach the geographical borders of Luhansk and Donetsk...

Hundreds of thousands of professional workers, many of them young, have left Russia since its invasion of Ukraine, accelerating an exodus of business talent and further threatening an economy targeted by Western sanctions. Those leaving the country include tech workers, scientists, bankers and doctors, according to surveys, economists and interviews with emigrants. They are departing for countries including Georgia, Armenia and Turkey. More are expected to follow. A mid-March survey by OK Russians, a nonprofit helping people leave the country, estimated that around 300,000 workers had departed since the war started in late February. While precise counts of the number...

Desperate Vladimir Putin is recruiting a Dad’s Army of old folks to prop up his creaking Ukraine invasion. The Russian army has put out an SOS for volunteers aged up to 60 after sustaining heavy losses during the disastrous six-week campaign. The military wants ex-soldiers nearing retirement age to rejoin in the Siberian cities of Chelyabinsk and Tyumen, according to Russian media. Moscow desperately wants old tank commanders, snipers and engineers. They would join up to 60,000 reservists recently called to active service along with 134,500 new conscripts forced into action. The conscripts - men aged 18 to 27 -...

An op-ed published by Russian state media on Sunday claimed that "Ukronazism" is a greater threat to the world than Hitler's Nazi Party and called for a complete Russian takeover of Ukrainian territory and culture, as Ukrainian forces continued to push back Russian invaders on Monday. Timofey Sergeytsev claimed in the op-ed published on RIA Novosti that the "Nazism" in Ukraine is "disguised as a desire for 'independence' and a 'European' (Western, pro-American) path of 'development' (in reality - to degradation)." He also wrote that the "majority" of Ukrainians are "passive Nazis, accomplices of Nazism," saying that they "are also...

She finished her university education and became an engineer, got married and had a son. Later she divorced and remarried in her 40s to Valerii Verbitski, whom she described as a "good man." Her life was simple and peaceful. That peace lasted until February 24, when Russian forces launched an unprovoked attack on Ukraine, barreling through her city, shelling neighborhoods, blowing up a government building, and encircling Kharkiv's estimated 1.4 million residents. "There was no water or power, we couldn't buy food. It became impossible to live," she said, "The air raid sirens never stopped, there was explosion after explosion....

One of the questions we see commonly debated in Dissident Right circles is just how long can the Global American Empire (GAE) really last as a hegemonic force in international politics. Some, like Curtin Yarvin/Mencius Moldbug, speculate that the Regime could last for another century or more. Others believe its demise will be within ten years or less. Both sides are likely overstating their cases, but I do tend to believe that the truth of the matter is much closer to the latter than the former. However one lands on this, it must surely be accepted that the answer will...

Following a weekend where Ukraine released a barrage of videos it says depicts massacres of civilians in the town of Bucha on the outskirts of Kiev, Western powers are mulling and readying a next wave of anti-Russia sanctions due to what the US and others say are war crimes. The European Council said in a Monday statement: "The European Union condemns in the strongest possible terms the reported atrocities committed by the Russian armed forces in a number of occupied Ukrainian towns, that have now been liberated."Ukrainian and Western media sources are widely citing that at least 300 residents of...

(There's a video at the site)Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Sunday said Russia has already experienced a “strategic defeat” in its invasion of Ukraine. “If you step back and look at this, this has already been a dramatic strategic setback for Russia, and I would say a strategic defeat,” Blinken told co-anchor Dana Bash on CNN’s “State of the Union” when asked about additional sanctions the U.S. may impose on Russia. Blinken said Russia has already failed in the three main goals it had at the start of its invasion of Ukraine. “They had three aims going into this....

To knock out Russian vehicles, Ukrainian teams lie in wait along roads — sometimes for days — before firing their missiles and sprinting away to their own vehicles for a quick escape. That’s the basic tactic the Ukrainians have worked out as Russia’s wider war in Ukraine enters its sixth week. Ukrainian missileers packing foreign-supplied anti-tank guided missiles, such as the American Javelin, as well as locally made ATGMs such as the Stugna-P and Corsar, have plunked at the Russian invasion force, knocking out a vehicle here and a vehicle there until the losses have become unsustainable for the Kremlin....

A video about World War 2 Soviet weapons brought out of storage to arm Ukrainian troops.

When a Russian tank army swept southwest from the Russia-Belarus border region into northern Ukraine on the morning of Feb. 24, a single Ukrainian tank brigade stood between it and the eastern suburbs of Kyiv. The Ukrainian army’s 1st Tank Brigade was outnumbered—not only by the 10 or so battalion tactical groups belonging to the Russian 41st Combined Arms Army, but also adjacent Russian formations. Incredibly, the 1st Tank Brigade not only halted the larger Russian force in the first few days of Russia’s wider war in Ukraine, it swiftly transitioned to an active defense and, for the next five...

The German government said that Russian President Vladimir Putin told Chancellor Olaf Scholz on Wednesday that Europe could continue paying for Russian gas in euros and not rubles as previously announced. German government spokesman Steffen Hebestreit said Putin had told Scholz that payments from Europe next month "would continue to be in euros and transferred as usual to the Gazprom Bank, which is not affected by sanctions." The bank would then convert the payments into rubles, Hebestreit quoted Putin as saying. Hebestreit said in a statement that Putin had stressed in the telephone call with Scholz "which took place at...

'Depressed' Vladimir Putin is 'set to hold a nuclear evacuation drill' with the Kremlin's doomsday plane after moving his family to a 'secret underground city' in Siberia, 'insider' account claims Questions have been raised over health and mental state of Russia's president Fears of nuclear conflict increased when he threatened NATO with 'consequences' if it intervened in the war, and put his nuclear forces on standby Now, a source has claimed he has told his close allies to prepare for nuclear drills An element of Russian plans for a nuclear war are a fleet of 'flying Kremlins' The doomsday planes...

Delayed maintenance, logistical limits and poor communication have exposed how vulnerable an army can be when it's poorly led.

As Russia pounded Ukraine in the opening days of its invasion, the defenders credited a new piece of equipment with helping them fight back — the Bayraktar TB2 drone. Videos shared by the Ukrainian military showed at least one strike appearing to tear apart a column of Russian tanks and armored vehicles. One came from Malyn in the Zhytomyr region, about 150 kilometers from Ukraine's capital, Kyiv, and shows the destruction of a Russian Buk surface-to-air missile launcher, the Ukrainian military said. "Bayraktars at work," the caption for the same video posted on an official military Facebook page said. "Be...

The Armed Forces of Ukraine showed the destruction of Russian equipment from the UCAV Bayraktar TB2. The video was posted on Facebook of the Ground Forces of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, nv.ua reports. According to People's Deputy Alexei Goncharenko, the video shows the destruction of units of the 1st Tank Army of Russia on the border with the Kharkiv region.

President Vladimir Putin has promised government backing for Islamic religious education in Russia, in a bid to stave extremism and cater to Russia’s large Muslim community. Up to 20 million Muslims make up Russia’s second-largest religious minority. Thousands of young radicalized Russians have travelled to Iraq and Syria to join jihadist fighters in recent years, making the country the largest source of foreign fighters in the war-torn region. At a meeting with Islamic religious figures on Wednesday, Russia’s president pledged “undoubted support” for a "revival of Islamic education in Russia," the state-run TASS news agency reported. “Traditional Islam is an...

For the last several years, Russian security services have driven Islamist radicals and others out of the North Caucasus and other regions of the Russian Federation under paid of jail or death to fight for ISIS in Syria, Israeli expert Avraam Shmulyevich says. Now that the last redoubts of the Islamic State in that country have fallen, these same services, exploiting Chechens in Syria, have begun to extract these same people back to Russia, an action that strongly suggests, the president of the Israeli Eastern Partnership Institute says, that Moscow plans to make use of them elsewhere – and may...